I will admit I only saw maybe half the series. The story I found most fascinating were the one or two episodes that talked about Clair Patterson, first in his work in determining the age of the Earth. The second bit I found interesting was his study on lead contamination in the environment and the health impacts on people and the hazards of leaded gasoline and lead use in big industry. What was more fascinating was his research was funded to with the exact opposite objective, he was getting corporate agenda sponsorship from the chemical industry to come up who wanted results favorable to their industry with no concern for the truth, and he risked his career to speak the truth and fought for 20 years to make an impact.
One thing I will say is I've been a cosmology enthusiast for years since I got hooked on the stuff the science channel would air. To be fair though, nothing I saw on cosmos was really new as far as cosmology goes. As far as cosmology video media goes it's pretty redundant in many ways between different content covering the same stuff just told a different way. Science writing like the books you'll see at Barnes and Nobles are for the most part pretty redundant as well, same story just told a different way. It makes it rather difficult to find more insightful material and it's kind of demoralizing in the process. Same books, different title and author, something about the big bang, some basic stuff about subatomic particles, some basics about quantum mechanics, always end with something about the LHC on its journey to discover the Higgs boson, maybe something substanceless about string theory hypothesis... and the whole time talking to the reader like they're children. There are some books in popular science publishing that are more insightful, but aren't accessible by requiring a higher undergraduate level of education in the field or graduate level of understanding to be of any use. The books I find most insightful are anything that comes from Dover publishing, but like I said just depends on the subject, some of it are kind of informative to anybody, other times for undergraduates, and other times for graduate students. And much of their material is dated, written decades ago and haven't really been updated since. There's a severe lack of material for people in between. I guess people can go back to school if they wanted, but who has that time or money.
Where I thought the new Cosmos differed from many other cosmology focused shows was it's focus on the achievements in people in science, and their adversity against the status quo. It's almost reflective with the current barriers to social and scientific and technological progress we see today, being bogged down in pervasive anti-intellectualism we see from today's conservative religious zealots. And, in some ways it was subtle, and in others rather heavy handed. But, this is how I felt the show stood out. That, and it's wider syndication on a number of different channels and networks.
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